Q. Is this really as harmful as you think?

A. Go to your parents house, your grandparents house etc and look at their Windows PC, look at the installed software in the past year, and try to use the device. Run some antivirus scans. There’s no way this implementation doesn’t end in tears — there’s a reason there’s a trillion dollar security industry, and that most problems revolve around malware and endpoints.

  • MacN'Cheezus
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    6 months ago

    I think that’s just regular Copilot (without the plus). This is a newer version, at least that’s what this quote from the article leads me to believe:

    I got ahold [sic] of the Copilot+ software and got it working on a system without an NPU about a week ago

    The regular Copilot (without the plus) that sits in the taskbar was rolled out in an update about a month or two ago.

    Also, this part of the article gives a method to check if it’s running:

    Q. How do you obtain the database files?

    A. They’re just files in AppData, in the new CoreAIPlatform folder.

    Unfortunately there are at least two AppData folders (three to be exact, but one of them is rarely used), and it doesn’t specify whether it’s %APPDATA% or %LOCALAPPDATA%, but I just checked on my Windows machine (Win11 with all updates installed, including Copilot), and I can find no such folder in either of these paths.

    EDIT: the video in this toot clearly shows the location of the database folder, and it’s in %LOCALAPPDATA%, which makes sense given that it’s stuff that’s not supposed to leave your device.

    EDIT2: this tweet seems to confirm that this is indeed a feature that’s only shipped on certain new devices, which need to be specially certified because Copilot+ requires hardware support.